The Poster, by Anne Ansermet

In the work of photographer Laziz Hamani, there is a series entitled, “Route of an unfinished canvas”. We have chosen one of them – “Continuity1” – which opens a space in a series, all the way to the enigma of a rectangular white canvas that constitutes the background of the photograph, leading to, perhaps, a tableau to come. How to know if this blank is an opening or a closing? While making this work, Laziz Hamani went from place to place with a “canvas”, always white and in the same format, which he placed in the specific places where he intervened, allowing a place for original works to arise from a certain happenstance. Such as the day when the canvas blew away, and new and unexpected dimensions were created as it placed itself in the landscape.

Is this a contingency, such as that which can occur in an analysis? The white canvas, both continuity and discontinuity, transfers from one space to another with the surprise of chance: an incident that moves from a continuous space to an enigmatic question. The inspiration emerging from the white creates something new where we thought we would find the same. We find something other than what we were looking for. It remains to be seized.

Isn’t this the same with transference? Transference in all its states is also continuity and discontinuity. Continuity: it puts the unconscious into action.2 Discontinuity: it proceeds from the instance that remains inaccessible3, from the “real that is a hole.”4 As the image suggests, the transference is also an “intermediate region”5 through which serial passages and crossings take place. But where do they come from? Perhaps, as in this work: on a white, blank screen, an empty surface, on which nothing is yet inscribed, beyond the known, the already seen, which transfers all elsewhere from there, where we were.